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THE DRINK PROBLEM 



IN 



MODERN LIFE 



BY 



HENRY C. POTTER 



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NEW YORK 






THOMAS Y. CROWELL 


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PUBLISHERS 







: LIBRARY of GOWfiRESS 


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MAR 1 


1905 


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COPY b. 

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Copyright, 1905, 
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

Published February, 1905. 



PUBLISHER'S NOTE 

The attention of legislators, reformers, and 
many other thoughtful people has been directed 
for a long time to remedying the saloon evil, 
especially as it exists in our large cities. Wide- 
spread interest and importance have attached 
to Bishop Potter's views of the subject, for 
which reasons the present treatise from his 
pen is timely. It is the substance of a Charge 
originally delivered at a Convention of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of 
New York, and gives forcible reasons for Bishop 
Potter's attitude, while throwing a powerful 
side-light upon the " Drink Problem " as it is 
to-day. 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 

"The Temperance Cause lies at the founda- 
tion of all social and political reform," once said 
Richard Cobden, whose preeminent rank as a 
great leader and greater benefactor to his kind 
few people will care, now, to dispute. 

The story of this cause during recent years, 
the variety and the heroism of methods fol- 
lowed, and their imperfect success are never- 
theless matters of widespread misapprehension ; 
and what is worse, widespread apathy. This 
last is worse because, oftener than otherwise, 
it is the result of serious inquiry and wide 
scrutiny, both of which have issued in the con- 
clusion that the subject is one concerning which 
good men and women are bound to differ, and 
concerning which — for this is the gravest aspect 
of the whole business — their differences are of 
no consequence. As well might we say that the 
differences about the organization of the Family 
which exist, e.g., here and in Salt Lake City, or 
Constantinople, are of no consequence ; and that 
clear and true views of duty do not affect con- 
duct. We know better than that. We know 



2 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

that you cannot found a state upon an Order 
which is false to the mind of God and the Spirit 
of His Divine Revelation ; and we ought to know 
that where these have disclosed themselves, as 
they have by the voice of Prophet, Apostle, and 
Martyr, it is at the peril of souls — our own and 
other men's, for whom, in some degree, we are 
also to answer — that we disregard them. 

When the great Apostle to the Gentiles 
stood before the Roman Governor Felix, "he 
reasoned," we are told, of " temperance," as 
well as of "righteousness" and "a judgment 
to come." The Greek word, as you will re- 
member, is iy/cpciTeias, of which the Latin equiv- 
alent is continentia, and there is no doubt that 
it is self-control of every kind which the Apostle 
has here in mind; as, undoubtedly, it is true 
that temperance is not only of one kind nor 
consists in self-control only in regard to one 
appetite. But as little is it to be forgotten that, 
over and over again, as in those memorable 
words, " Be not drunk with wine wherein is 
excess, but be filled with the Spirit," the New 
Testament very plainly warns us against a dan- 
ger which is even more our danger than theirs 
to whom, originally, the Apostolic warnings and 
Epistles were addressed. The Christian Church 
has undoubtedly wasted much energy, and well- 
intentioned Christian people are still wasting 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 3 

much activity, in the pursuit of methods and 
maxims concerning the drink-habit which have 
earned for them the ridicule, if not the resent- 
ment, of reasoning and reflecting people ; but 
those of us who judge such persons harshly 
are often willingly ignorant of situations and 
incidents which are peculiar to our modern 
civilization, and which have, and had, no paral- 
lel in Oriental times or customs. Let me make 
my meaning here quite plain. If the dangers 
from drunkenness had been as great or as immi- 
nent in the tropical countries in which the first 
missionaries of Christianity lived, and to which 
they wrote, as they are in ours, I believe that 
their language would have been much plainer 
and stronger, though I believe they would not 
have departed from the wise law by which they 
were governed, which did not lay down rules, 
but which enunciated principles. For modern 
life in New York is not ancient life, whether in 
Jerusalem or Antioch. The modern strain of 
bread-winning is not the easy task of earlier 
or later tropical existence. 

With our conditions have arisen a whole 
family of perils, of which the men and women 
of St. Paul's time could have little or no 
knowledge. We resent, alas ! as an intolerable 
impertinence, a reference to these conditions, 
as though they were all of a nature for which 



4 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

we were in no wise responsible, and to which we 
could bring no amelioration ; but, in fact, no one 
who is reaping the benefits of any single one of 
the achievements of our twentieth century civili- 
zation has a right to do so without asking him- 
self the question, What are modern cheapness, 
and invention, and machinery, and all the multi- 
tude of inexpensive conveniences which make 
my life so different from the life of my fore- 
fathers — what are these things costing — not 
the employer who produces them, nor the 
tradesman who sells them, bat the mechanic 
who makes them ? And how can I judge him 
whose task is so narrow, so confining, and so 
monotonous, if, now and then, he " evens up," 
as he says, and introduces a little variety into 

cannot blame him J' say a large 
body of sympathetic and serious-minded people, 
** and so, rather, let us blame th t who put 
temptation in his way, and who furnish him 
with the means to drown, for a little, his reason 
in the lethe of drink." We have had, and still 
have, as I pointed out not long ago, a school of 
reformers who had excogitated, at this point, a 
definite philosophy of responsibility* which, since 
then, has found its echo in denunciations and in 
legislation equally impotent and futile. Mr. John 
B. Gough was the father of this School of 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 5 

Reformers, whose shibboleth is that the drunkard 
is a victim and not a trangressor ; and who, in con- 
sistent forgetf ulness of the Apostolic maxim that 
"every man shall bear his own burden," have 
undertaken to create for us a new earth, if not 
a new heaven, by penalties which strike at the 
man who sells an intoxicant rather than at the 
man who buys and drinks it. Let us not seem 
to underestimate the responsibility of him who, 
whether for pleasure or for profit, "putteth a 
stumbling-block or an occasion to fall in his 
brother's way." 

That this is both real and grave, he only 
can doubt who has come to doubt all moral 
standards, or to believe that one can divorce 
any part of his life from those obligations to 
love and safeguard one's neighbor as one's self, 
which are fundamental to the Mind of Christ. 
But the mischief of much of our modern philan- 
thropy, in this connection, has been that, in 
recognizing a common obligation, it has mini- 
mized those primary obligations which are not 
common but individual. The Apostle is careful 
to marry to that great precept, "bear ye one 
another's burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ," 
that elementary and eternal condition of human 
existence that " every man shall bear his own 
burden." It is in vain, therefore, that, in the 
administration of human laws which deal with 



6 THE DRIXK PROBLEM 

vice or crime, it has been common for the judge, 
or the jury, to take into account, and to make 
allowance for, the inebriated condition in which 
the offender committed a crime. 

The human conscience, more unerring in its 
decisions, often, than the fallible mechanisms 
which are the product of an artificial civilization, 
demands, " Whose act was it that chose to take 
the drug or the dram which produced this state 
of so-called unconscious irresponsibility ? " and 
to that question the law, or the jury, or the judge, 
who conspired to shield the culprit must give a 
valid answer, or accept the responsibility of the 
act which they condone. 

It was not unnatural that, confronted by such 
questions as these, an unreflecting public senti- 
ment should have taken refuge in legislation 
which, if it refused to face the issues which it 
raised, brushed them aside with sweeping enact- 
ments which, at one blow, proposed to destroy a 
traffic which it could not control. Nothing could 
have demonstrated more clearly the utter fail- 
ure of that attempt than the hysterical and vitu- 
perative denunciations with which the disclosure 
of that failure has been met. In this connection 
the association of the principle of local politics, 
whether municipal or national, with that of pro- 
hibition has notes which are alike pathetic and 
alarming : pathetic because it reveals how weak 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 7 

they may be whose great place forbids that they 
shall speak the truth as they know it; -and alarm- 
ing because it discloses to us how little represent- 
ative, under the dominion of this cowardice, are 
even the best minds among us. 

It is such a situation as this which makes duty, 
to-day, so plain. If mere enthusiasm, often blind, 
and oftener partisan and one-sided ; if represent- 
atives of the law, in its executive or administra- 
tive acts ; if the law itself, as the expression of a 
great popular movement — if all these together 
are unequal to the abatement, or at any rate to 
the banishment of an evil so great as that which, 
in this connection, afflicts our land and our people, 
then, surely, it remains to those who believe 
supremely in the presence in the world of Divine 
forces and influences, which of all others make 
most potentially for righteousness, to arise and 
strive. For myself, I do not believe that such 
forces have been asleep, or that their results may 
not be traced. I remember very well the pro- 
found impression produced upon my own mind 
by the statements of an able and experienced 
physician, to whom I put the question, " Tell me 
whether, in this region of country, with which, 
as a physician, you have been familiar for more 
than a quarter of a century, you consider the 
drink-habit more or less prevalent ? " His an- 
swer at once was, "'Far less prevalent. When, 



8 THE DRIXK PROBLEM 

a quarter of a century ago, I arrived in a village, 
and left my horse at' the village tavern, I was 
expected to take a drink at its bar with every 
man who asked me ; and had I refused to do so, 
should have been regarded as a churl or a snob. I 
am not now even asked to do so ; and if I were, 
and were to accept, such an act would be con- 
sidered discreditable both to my personal stand- 
ing and my professional character." 

Such an incident is of value because it dis- 
closes what has widely come to pass in our land, 
and what has often a very misleading influence 
upon our judgments. When we were a homo- 
geneous people, an hundred years ago or more, 
our drinking habits were far more convivial and 
excessive than they are to-day ; but this is only 
to say that people who had brought with them 
from other lands certain traditions of indulgence 
and especially certain usages of hospitality, 
strove to maintain them, and to pass them on to 
their children. But we are no longer a homo- 
geneous people, and while it is quite true that 
the usages in houses in which you and I are at 
home are much simpler and less indulgent than 
were the drinking usages of our ancestors, it can- 
not be pretended that this is true of the larger 
life of to-day, or of great masses of people for 
whom, whether we like to recognize it 'or not, 
you and I are in some fashion responsible. 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 9 

"Who are they?" is it asked? I answer 
that I am not now referring to that class of 
imported citizen whom, if we accept at all in 
this land, it is curiously enough asserted that 
we must accept with all the idiosyncrasies as to 
drink, and the times, and manner, and measure 
of consumption of it, that he has brought with 
him. For myself, I have never acquiesced in 
any such loose and essentially licentious dogma, 
nor will I. It is entirely competent for a re- 
public to make its own liquor laws ; as it is for 
it to make any other laws. If to any they are 
distasteful, then the impulse which has brought 
so many out from under the yoke of other dis- 
tasteful laws in other lands may take them 
back again. " I thought this was a free coun- 
try," exclaims the foreigner, sometimes, brought 
up suddenly by some severe restriction to which 
he happens to have been unwonted. "No, my 
son ! There can be no such free country as 
your words imply, unless it be a country of un- 
bridled license; and that would have in it the 
seed of its own speedy doom. If, in this land, 
there are restrictions, it is because they are for 
the greatest good of the greatest number." 

But here a question inevitably arises which 
underlies the whole discussion, and that is the 
question, " What is the greatest good of the 
greatest number ? " It is impossible to look on 



10 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

the face of human society, it is still more impos- 
sible to read human history, and not recognize 
the fact that that which makes a great people 
or a great man is the presence and the power 
of a great ideal, and that no mere rule can take 
the place of an ideal — even though it be the 
rule, e.g., of total abstinence. Now then, the 
history of the enforcement of a mere rule has 
wrought in the temperance reform precisely 
what it has wrought in every other great move- 
ment, — it has produced formalists, but it has 
not been fruitful in virtue. It is not necessary, 
at this late day, to produce the evidence of this, 
for at last the facts have become so notorious 
that honest men have ceased to challenge them ; 
but if any one of us is in doubt on the subject, I 
desire to commend to him the pamphlet of Mr. 
Albert Griffen of Topeka, Kansas (which Mr. 
GrifTen will send him accompanied by a Total 
Abstinence Pledge), entitled "An Earnest Ap- 
peal for the Substitution of Christian for Pagan 
Methods in all Moral Reform Work." Says 
Mr. Griffen in this pamphlet : " Not long ago, 
a prominent and estimable prohibitionist (in 
Kansas) said, ' If any one wishes to send 
to Kansas City (which is in the State of Mis- 
souri, across the river from the State of Kansas, 
and not subject to the Prohibitory Law of the 
former) and get a case of beer for his own use, 



THE DRINK PROBLEM II 

I have no objection. What I want is to close 
the open saloon.' " Now, I am not quoting this 
incident to indicate the depravity, duplicity, and 
essential dishonesty of the person whose words 
it recites. I am not sure that we may justly 
impute any of these things to him ; for it is one 
thing to object, altogether, to a particular traffic, 
and quite another to object to certain features, 
characteristics, or conditions of that traffic ; and 
the misfortune of those who are advocating pro- 
hibitory laws, whether they are to be applied 
to Sunday or week-day usages, is that in their 
zeal for one object, and that a very good object, 
they fail to recognize the influence of their 
methods upon the minds of those who look at 
a subject less microscopically and more widely 
and largely than they do. It cannot be denied 
— the hysterical and abusive denials which one 
sees or hears only furnish to a philosophic mind 
the stronger evidence for the thing denied — 
that the growth of the consumption of substi- 
tutes for things against the use of which prohibi- 
tory laws are aimed has risen side by side with 
the prevalence of those laws ; and the observa- 
tion and published statistics of medical men in 
States where such laws have obtained opens a 
chamber of horrors into which I have no heart 
to ask you to enter. 

Indeed, the wonder is that that chamber does 



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THE DRINK PROBLEM 1 3 

conditions in which restlessness and impatience 
are the dominant notes in their lives. 

And what is the product of it all ? You do 
not need to have me tell you that it is a wide- 
spread discontent which threatens our whole 
social structure. Wealth is unequally dis- 
tributed, we are told, and the sophistries that 
are born of envy and hatred are hawked about 
the streets to inflame, in a land which refuses 
to enthrone any class above another, the pas- 
sions of the less clever, or thrifty, or industrious 
against those who are more so. At such a mo- 
ment and under such conditions our prohibitory 
laws, whether we put them in operation on one 
day only, or on all days, are as stupid as they 
are ineffectual. Under a system of government 
that boasts that it knows no privileged classes, 
we cater to them at every corner, and the club, 
the hotel, the fashionable restaurant furnishes 
for a dollar what the wearer of a fustian 
jacket with his five or ten cents cannot even 
venture to ask for. And yet this is a system 
which we defend in the name of our Puritan 
forefathers and our primitive traditions. I often 
wonder, if they could come back and see our 
changed conditions, what they would say to 
it! 

" Well," do I hear some one say, "are we to 
understand from this that your judgment is that 



14 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

all law, in the matter of the indulgence in intoxi- 
cants, should be abrogated, and that a great 
community such, e.g., as this should be left on 
Sundays and week-days alike to unbridled indul- 
gence ? " No, I have never held to any such 
view as that, nor have argued for it. No sane 
man can be in any doubt about the enormous 
dangers to our modern life of the drink-habit. 

Toward the changed conditions of that modern 
life I have already glanced in passing ; and no 
one of us can be wholly unaware of them. I 
have lived in this city nearly forty years, and I 
cannot pretend that, in any calling in which one 
is set to earn his bread, such a task is as easy as 
it was forty years ago. What we gain, or seem 
to gain, at one end, we lose, or seem to lose, at 
the other. To sum up the whole situation in 
a statement which can hardly be disputed, the 
individual seems to me increasingly to count for 
less. The other day, in another country, I saw 
a cash register, invented, I believe, and patented 
in our own, that not only notes sales, makes 
change and delivers it, but completes also the 
entry of the purchase, records the whole trans- 
action, and delivers to the buyer a receipted bill. 
Now, the feature in this whole ingenuity, note- 
worthy and clever as it certainly is, which must 
needs interest a very large number of people, is 
the employee or the two or three employees 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 1 5 

> 

that disappear out of the shop with the intro- 
duction of this invention. They may have been 
doing their duty with scrupulous and unwearied 
fidelity, and their employer — but at this point 
I hear some one exclaim, " Hold on there ! 
They have no employer. They are working for 
a corporation, and they never see or treat with 
anybody but a department manager." Very 
well then ; the department manager knows that 
they have been honest and faithful ; but no 
matter ; they must go, because the machine will 
work cheaper than they can, — and they go — 
where ? to what? 

Well, they do not go to sleep, or to play. 
They must live, and it may be that like Erskine, 
when, a young and untried barrister, he stood 
before the Court of Appeals in the House of 
Lords and said, " My Lords, I am sensible of 
my audacity in standing here ; but, my Lords, I 
have felt my children plucking at my skirts and 
crying, ' Father, give us bread ! '" — like him, I 
say, these may have felt children's hands pluck- 
ing at their skirts and have heard children cry, 
" Give us bread." And if they do, and if, seek- 
ing in vain for a task and a wage, men and 
women strive for a little to dull the keen edge 
of their despair, and to drown by narcotics or 
intoxicants the horror of their helplessness, is 
our only resource such legal enactments as shall 



1 6 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

make their mischievous self-indulgence more 
furtive and more adroit? 

"Well, really," do I hear some one say, " this 
is the most extraordinary appeal for the abro- 
gation of good laws that I ever listened to — 
most of all from the lips of a Christian Bishop ! 
Are we to be told that the conditions of our 
modern life are such that the only alternative 
for those of us who abhor — and rightly abhor — 
a drunken society and a bacchanalian Sabbath 
is to repeal all laws which seek to discourage 
the one, or to repress the other ? " Most surely 
not ; but we do need to have it shown to us that 
the remedy for evils which we all alike deplore 
does not He along lines which hitherto we have 
followed, but demands a much wider outlook, 
a much wiser method, and, most of all, a much 
more constant personal service than any that, 
hitherto, we have rendered or even contem- 
plated. Let me speak of these things in the 
order in which I have named them. 

And first, let us strive to recognize the fact that 
the present situation in the matter of the drink- 
habit demands of those who propose, in any wise, 
to deal with it, a much wider outlook than has 
hitherto been our wont. It has been our wont, I 
think, to attribute the drink-habit mainly to two 
causes, the convivial instinct and an inherited 
appetite. I would not underestimate either of 



THE DRINK PROBLEM \J 

these, but I am persuaded, as I have already in- 
dicated, that these causes account, as a matter of 
fact, for a very small percentage of our wide- 
spread and prevalent inebriety. Our times have, 
in this particular, created their own perils ; and 
they are perils which threaten both sexes and 
all ages, and which, in many cases, may not be 
evaded. Undoubtedly it is true that, so far as 
ordinary usage and habit are concerned in the 
matter of intoxicants, the standards in many de- 
partments of life are higher than those of our 
ancestors. But when I am reminded that many 
— the majority, I presume — railway corpora- 
tions will not employ a man who drinks, and 
when this is quoted to me as a great advance in 
the standards of the present as compared with 
those of an hundred years ago, I wonder whether 
I am called upon to remind this boaster that one 
hundred years ago there were no railways, and 
therefore no situation pertinent to such a com- 
parison. The illustration is an appropriate one, 
just at this point ; for it recalls to us the multi- 
tudinous ways in which the civilization of our 
fathers was unlike our own, and how there 
has come into being, in our own time, a whole 
group of situations new, exacting, and, most of 
all, exhausting. In a word, the very conditions 
of life itself have changed ; and if men, and 
especially women, are to face and master the 



1 8 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

problem of life, many of them honestly believe 
that they must have an occasional surcease from 
care to which, whether it is furnished by whiskey 
or opium or some other equivalent stimulant or 
narcotic, they believe that they must turn. I 
wonder whether any of those to whom I speak 
happen to have read the defence of the impor- 
tation of opium recently published by an Eng- 
lish physician. Let me say at once that I am 
not referring to it to indorse it, to commend it, 
or, in any way, to approve of it ; but simply to 
submit it as testimony at once dispassionate 
and, so far as its details were concerned, scru- 
pulously reserved, to the effect that, on the 
whole, modern life, in modern lands, was impos- 
sible, save as, somehow, the strain and stress of 
it were ameliorated by the use of agencies 
which made its exactions less incessant and less 
exhausting. 

Observe, I am not urging the competency of 
such specialists to prescribe for the disease which 
they diagnose. I am simply calling attention 
to their diagnosis as a matter with which, in 
connection with the whole drink-question, we 
must needs be concerned. Is it true that the 
tasks of the bread-winner, the daily wage-earner, 
who make up the vast majority of our human 
kind, even under the most advanced forms of 
our civilization, are more exacting and more 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 19 

monotonous than those of their predecessors ? 
For myself, I have no slightest doubt of it. 
Society rises, indeed, with a marvellous swift- 
ness and efficacy, to respond to the cry for help 
for those who cannot work at all ; but the case 
of those who can is not, I think, made easier, 
but more difficult, as the days go by. We pro- 
gress steadily and splendidly in the fertility 
of our inventions ; but, as the cleverness and 
adroitness of machinery rises, the demands upon 
the cleverness and adroitness of the workman 
diminish. And yet they cannot diminish with- 
out leaving his task more circumscribed, more 
mechanical, and more monotonous. Do we 
know how mechanical and monotonous, at last, 
it may become, and do we know what a mechan- 
ical monotony at length takes out of a man ? 
For, until we do, we are in no position to judge 
our brother, who, at the end of his day's tasks, 
turns to stimulants or narcotics which to us may 
be abhorrent. His home and yours — have you 
ever compared them ? His leisure and yours, 
•his environment and yours, his food and the 
conditions of its preparation, his recreations, 
companionships — in one word, his resources 
and yours — do you know, not how like, but 
how utterly unlike they are ? And yet, when 
you talk to this brother man, you are surprised, 
it may be, to find in him tastes and sympathies 



20 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

and aspirations not unlike your own ! What 
chance have they, and what warrant have you 
and I, for criticisms, behind which has been 
no single effort to better the habits which they 
assail, or the conditions out of which those 
habits have sprung ? 

You will gather from all this how superficial, 
how utterly inhuman, inconsiderate, and unrea- 
sonable I regard a great deal of that doubtless 
often well-intentioned zeal which seeks to make 
men and women virtuous and temperate by a 
law of indiscriminate repression. I do ! I do ! 
and if I am sent here of God for nothing else, I 
am sent here to tell you that ; and to entreat you 
to discern that most of our methods for dealing 
with the drink-evil in our day and generation 
are tainted with falsehood, dishonored by essen- 
tial unreality, and discredited by widespread and 
consistent failure. There is a drink-evil ; and 
you and I must not ignore it. There is a task 
for Christian men and women, just here, to per- 
form, and you and I must not shirk it. But let 
us begin by trying to recognize the facts, and 
then let us strive to deal with them in a way 
worthy of their portentous significance. 

And this will require on our part a frank rec- 
ognition of certain situations of which, here, I 
I can only speak briefly ; but concerning which 
I dare not be silent. 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 21 

► ■ 

The life of men is necessarily largely passed 
in their homes; and whatever mechanisms we 
have devised for bettering the conditions, or 
varying the monotony, or widening the resources 
of the poor man's home have had, as a rule, 
this defect, that they touched only one or two 
members of such a home and habitually neg- 
lected the woman, who must forever be the 
centre of it ; and who, in the homes of the poor, 
is oftener than otherwise the prisoner most closely 
confined and hardly worked of all. Do you 
know, now, what will bring largest relief and 
sunshine to such a toiler ? Miss Octavia Hill, 
who, with a splendid heroism, and a patience 
that was simply divine, led the way in the vast 
reforms in structures which are a resplendent 
note in the modern London home for the work- 
ing-man, has shown us how a great many con- 
structive and sanitary improvements in such 
buildings have been neglected or abused by those 
for whom they were provided, because they in- 
volved, in their care and administration, a con- 
siderable increase of vigilance and labor. The 
illustration is of value because it makes plain to 
us that no ascent from primitive and animal-like 
modes of living can be made without an expen- 
diture, whether of mind or of force, which, upon 
a very tired man or woman, makes a demand 
which they will shirk if they can. I presume 



22 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

that you and I would, if we were in their place ; 

— and such facts indicate the lines along which 
beneficence must needs move, if what we reckon 
as progress is not to have the inevitable tendency 
of driving men and women out, and not beckon- 
ing them into, their homes. " I belong to a club 

— to three or four of them," says a man of suffi- 
cient income not only to pay his dues at the club, 
but to equip what he calls his "den" at home; 
" but I spend most of my evenings under my 
own roof ; " and this disciple of domesticity 
beams upon you with an air of conscious virtue, 
and cries out, " Shut up the saloons, Sundays 
and week-days, too, if you can. The place of 
the working-man is in his home ! " And he 
knows as much about the working-man's home 
as he does about the rabbit-hutch on an Aus- 
tralian farm ! 

I have no leisure here to discuss the questions 
of food and recreation as I should wish to do, 
in this connection. The growth, in our America, 
of life in hotels ; the vast number of your friends 
whom you recognize when you go, yourself, to 
a good restaurant, whether in an inn or in a club ; 
the throngs that, night after night, fill every place 
of amusement in the land, and the steady ten- 
dency, in all considerable communities in the 
United States, in places of amusement, to be no 
more and to aspire no higher ; — these are facts 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 2$ 

which, when we lay them side by side with the 
lives of those who form the great majority in the 
communities in which most of us live, have a 
profound and tragic significance. " We want a 
more strenuous life," cry a certain school of 
philosophers among us. Well, it is just those 
whose tasks grow, daily, more exacting, and 
whose labor is, if not more incessant, more 
monotonous, who are among the chief patrons of 
places and indulgences that we regard as most 
evil. A young friend of mine who was, I am 
proud to say, a candidate for Holy Orders in 
this Diocese, told me that he and his wife, not 
long ago, had spent their summer in town, and 
had devoted themselves to furnishing recreation 
and social relaxation to two classes of persons, — 
bank clerks and car-drivers. " But why those 
two ? " I asked. And the discerning answer was, 
" Because they struck us as tied to tasks that 
were both irksome and monotonous." There 
was a fine discernment here, which the Christian 
Religion and the Church of God must bring to 
bear upon all our social problems, if they would 
solve them. 

In the considerations which I have thus far 
urged will be found, I think, the grounds for 
that wider outlook to which, to-day, we are 
called, as well as the reasons which have made 
it impossible for me to feel any very keen inter- 



24 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

est in controversies which have raged all around 
us, and which concern not alone this city, but 
every town, and village, and hamlet in the land. 
We have been trying to fit old laws to new con- 
ditions ; and then we have railed against the 
law-maker on the one hand, or the executive 
on the other, because the laws and those who 
administered them so poorly realized our ideals. 
Believe me, we shall have to go a good deal 
deeper than that ! The law, it should be re- 
membered, under such a system of government 
as ours, emanates from the people, but our civic 
situation makes it possible for us to be under 
the authority 7 of laws which are in no sense the 
expression of the people who must obey them. 
Here in this city we are ruled, as to some of the 
gravest interests that affect our well-being, by a 
law-making body that the largest charity cannot 
erect into a competent or sufficiently informed 
judge of our moral or social conditions ; and if 
we venture to say so, ignorance and insolence 
revenge themselves upon out criticism by giv- 
ing the screw of the law another turn, that 
we may " know our place and keep it ! " Our 
Republican, or Democratic, system of govern- 
ment has never been put to a severer test than 
that to which it has been subjected in this 
Commonwealth, when a legislature, enriched by 
neither our best brains nor our widest experi- 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 2$ 

ence, has, with an audacity as smug as it was 
vociferous, made laws for the second city in 
the world, and insisted that it knew better 
what that city needed than the city itself could 
know ! I protest, we are not a community of 
thugs or bummers ! For myself, I should be 
perfectly willing to submit every Sunday law 
that we have — whatever traffic it regulates or 
represses, on whatever sacred day of the week 

— to a vote of the people of the town who have 
a right to votej confident that every hallowed 
interest would be protected, and that the day of 
unbridled license, which so many so confidently 
foretell, would never dawn. We are not a 
godless and dissolute mob, waiting to pour scorn 
upon those great ideas and beliefs in which the 
founders of this Republic laid its first stones; 
and, if there is a condition of things among us, 

— if we have inherited restraints and limitations 
which are not common to the oldest and best- 
tested civilizations in Christendom, then we are 
not Pagans because we challenge them ! The 
times call for a great many things ; but for 
nothing louder than for an intelligent and fear- 
less discrimination ! 

And this for no other reason so much as be- 
cause, by a great number of our wisest and best 
citizens, various methods now being employed 
in this country to diminish or restrict the drink- 



26 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

traffic; to present to the public counter-attractions 
to the saloon ; to place the sale of intoxicants 
entirely and exclusively in the hands of the civil 
authorities; and to increase the cost of the manu- 
facture or the sale of everything of the kind, so 
that it shall cease to be the profitable business 
that it undoubtedly is in many instances to-day 

— all this is now being attempted and is wise 
and well, as far as it goes. As far as it goes, I 
say, for no one can deal candidly with the facts 
in the case without owning that each and all of 
these expedients has gone but a very little way, 

— and seems likely to ! 

It was, therefore, with a very keen and sympa- 
thetic interest that I listened, last spring, to a 
statement made by Earl Gray to a few persons 
at the City Club in this metropolis on the Tem- 
perance Problem in Great Britain, and the latest 
and by far the most promising movement of 
which I have heard for grappling with it. The 
situations in the two countries are not identical, 
and the methods to be employed in dealing with 
them are not and cannot be the same. But one 
or two facts are true in each case, and these, 
as it happens, He at the bottom of the whole 
business. 

One of these is that the saloon or the gin 
palace, whether it exists here, or in Liverpool, 
or Manchester, has for its most determined 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 2J 

enemies those who never use it, and, as a rule, 
know nothing about it. I doubt whether their 
assaults upon it, and their pictures of what its 
influence has been and is, have ever had the 
slightest effect upon those whom they aimed to 
reach. Men and boys have been won away 
from the saloon, but it has been by methods 
of which Messrs. Rowntree and Sherwell tell 
in their admirable volume, " The Temperance 
Problem and Social Reform," which I commend 
to every one who hears me as incomparably the 
most valuable contribution which recent times 
have given us to this whole discussion. 1 " I 
was visiting," says the present Bishop of Lon- 
don, then Bishop of Stepney — (I am quoting 
from the volume to which I refer,) "in the Lon- 
don Hospital, and found myself sitting by the 
side of a broken-legged publican. When he 
heard who I was, he began asking about the 
welfare of several of our club members." (The 
Bishop had been Warden of the Oxford House 
Settlement, in Bethnal Green, whose men's clubs 
have a total membership of 950, and an average 
nightly attendance of 475.) " I asked him," 
said the Bishop, " how he knew these club 
members of mine." "Oh," he said, "they were 

1 " The Temperance Problem and Social Reform." By 
Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell. 7th ed. Truslove, 
Hanson & Comba. 



28 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

regular customers of ours before they joined 
your club; I had a public house down your 
way." 2 In other words, the public house fur- 
nished something to these youths, and they 
went there for it ; the time came when they 
found, elsewhere, what they cared more for, 
and then they went where they could get that. 2 
And though Settlements, whether like Oxford 
House, or Toynbee Hall, or anything here, or 
in Boston, or Chicago, which have striven to 
grapple with the drink problem have not yet 
solved it, they have pointed steadily in one direc- 
tion as furnishing its solution, and as indicating 
the methods by which we may reach it. It is in 
vain that you tell the working-man that the saloon 
is evil, until at least you are honest enough to 
recognize that there are features of it that are not 
evil, and that, as often as otherwise, those are 
they which he most of all prizes, and oftenest 
turns to. Again, it is in vain that philanthropy 
— or at any rate philanthropy as feeble, as 
intermittent, and as unintelligent as is much 
of that which has, thus far, grappled with 
the drink problem — attempts such measures of 
reform as simply emphasize the evils which 

1 "The Temperance Problem," etc., page 581. 

2 The Rev. J. E. Freeman, its president, advises me that the 
Club using the Holly Tree Inn in his parish has between 1 100 
and 1200 members, and often 300 working-men in .one room ! 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 29 

•they seek to fight. Two or three facts must 
be plainly recognized and candidly dealt with 
before we can even make a beginning. 

One of these consists, as Lord Gray told us, 
in a clear discrimination between conditions with 
which, unlike as are those of an American city 
to those of a European city, both alike must 
reckon. For example, one kind of man goes to 
a saloon to get an intoxicant, and for no other 
reason. Another goes there for any one of 
half a dozen purposes : refreshment, amusement, 
companionship, information, physical easement, 
business appointment, or mere change; for which 
last, you, my brother, go next door, or to the 
club, and which all sensible people regard as 
wholly innocent. Now then, the strength of 
the saloon-keeper has been in keeping the 
supply of these different wants together. The 
wisdom of those who antagonize him will be in 
separating them. 

This the great Public House Movement in 
England has done. If you want gin, or rum, 
or whiskey, or any intoxicant, you must go to a 
place where these are sold by corporate authority, 
and utterly without profit to the individual who 
sells them. If this individual can sell you, in- 
stead, tea, milk, coffee, or some other harmless 
beverage (if there is any harmless beverage), he 
will share the profits of the sale, and at the end 



30 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

of the year the village, or town, or city, will share 
it still more largely ; so that, already, there are 
towns in England that have been lighted with 
electricity, provided with a park, a music hall, 
or some other substantial form of recreation, 
out of a traffic which steadily diminishes the 
sale of intoxicants and increasingly promotes 
the health and recreation of the people. 

I have no space here to go into the merits 
of this really great scheme — the first, I think, 
in modern times, that, in recognizing a situation, 
has dealt with it in a really great way. It opens 
vistas of further progress, along which all the 
training of these modern days is educating us 
to advance. This is the age of great capitalistic 
combinations ; and after railing at them or de- 
nouncing them, according to our more or less 
imperfect lights, a great many of us come to see 
that, on the American principle of the greatest 
good of the greatest number, more than one of 
them that we have been railing against most 
vehemently is a cheapener of production, and 
so, in the long run, a friend to the poor. I 
wonder that it has never occurred to the Tem- 
perance Reformer to attempt a reformation by 
conversion and not by annihilation. Behind the 
modern saloon-keeper, vicious as he may be, and 
evil as may be his traffic, stand a great multitude 
who regard their rights as invaded when he is 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 3 1 

attacked, and yet not one in five of whom would 
not own that his business is largely mischievous 
in its effects, and almost universally deteriorat- 
ing in its tendencies. Are these irredeemable ? 
Is the whole incapable of transformation ? Are 
they only demons or robbers who are engaged 
in it ? 

Suppose, for a moment, that the same gen- 
ius that has touched and transformed great 
industries should band itself, for a little, to 
understand that great Temperance Movement 
which to-day is going on, on the other side of 
the Atlantic, and to bring to its inauguration 
among us the best brain and the most generous 
use of capital in the land, would such a move- 
ment be without material as well as moral re- 
wards ? On the contrary, I believe that the one 
would surprise us as much as the other; and 
that what I saw last summer, night after night, 
in the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen — how I 
wish I could reproduce that charming and alto- 
gether healthy and attractive scene here ! 1 — 
might become a part, and that a typical part, of 
our summer life in this great city ! No, no, let 
him doubt or falter who will, we have come to 

1 After the Charge was delivered, I learned that the founder 
of this garden was the father of one of our Clergy, — the Rev. 
Mr. Carstensen, — and that the fellow-citizens of this wise Dane 
had erected his statue in a public square in Copenhagen. 



32 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

recognize great evils, and a great degradation, 
in our present mechanisms of refreshment and 
recreation in America. Our next step ought to 
be — nay, it must be — that cordial unification 
of the forces of brain, of wealth, and of energy 
with which we may re-create, transform, and 
ennoble them! 

And this brings me to the final word on this 
whole subject which I would leave with you. 
There is a marked tendency in much of the 
organization of our modern life to eliminate 
the individual, or to reduce him, in the vast 
mechanism of our social fabric, to be a mere 
cog in a wheel, which revolves without much 
reference either to his predilections or his in- 
heritance, and this, curiously enough, is called 
" the higher civilization." Its relative value and 
its possible mischiefs open too vast a field for 
our discussion here, but certainly it is a perti- 
nent question to this occasion and to this place 
to ask, " What had Jesus to say to such a con- 
ception of human society ? " If its divinest 
conception was one that annihilated human free- 
dom, and absorbed the individual in some vast 
mechanism which minimized personal responsi- 
bility, then we ought to find some trace of such 
a society in the New Testament, but we look 
for it there in vain. And since then, whether 
we look at the Assumptionist Fathers in France, 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 33 

> or at the history of such a fellowship as that of 
the Shakers in our own land, we look in vain 
for any faintest warrant for believing that 1 ' the 
development of virtue consists in the annihila- 
tion of personality. On the contrary, the thing 
of paramount interest about the Four Gospels 
is that they are so largely the story of the way in 
which a Divine Life touched and influenced 
human perso?ialities. It is in vain that we strive 
to harness Jesus Christ to our great modern 
movements by showing how He organized men, 
and articulated machinery, and multiplied local 
associations. He did nothing of the sort, and 
if one says that He did not do it because He 
left it for His Apostles and disciples to do 
when they went about planting and organizing 
churches, the answer is that, in what these said 
and wrote, as with their Master, the prevailing 
note was not that of a mechanical organization, 
but of spiritual truth, forever appealing to the 
personal conscience and the personal will ! 

And to that which was the prevailing charac- 
teristic of the first preaching of the Gospel, I 
believe we must to-day return in all our strivings 
for reform. We are seeking to achieve reforms 
by legal enactment ; but " what the law could 
not do," says the Apostle, "the Spirit, of Jesus 
Christ," speaking to the individual soul and the 
personal power of choice, "can do, and does 



34 THE DRINK PROBLEM 

do." Go back and read the history of the great 
Washingtonian Movement ! We have forgotten 
all about it, now, but I can remember its triumphs 
in my childhood, and they were the triumphs 
of personal interest and service — unwearied 
watchfulness, untiring patience, inextinguishable 
hope, watching, persuading, leading, lifting, for- 
giving, encouraging, and forever loving — which 
at last conquered, emancipated, and redeemed ! 
Ah, what triumphs after this fashion I can re- 
call at this moment, where one woman has been 
will, and purpose, and vigilance, untiring ; her 
whole life overflowing with tenderness into the 
other's until that other has staggered at last to his 
feet again, and, with a child's self-distrust and a 
man's strength of purpose, has fought his way 
back at last to blameless living ! Oh, my brother, 
my sister, my daughter, my son, somewhere in 
you God has shut up this strange power of influ- 
encing some other, and of redeeming some other 
life sold under its base dominion to a base appe- 
tite so that at last it shall be free ! We may make 
laws until there is no part of life that their re- 
strictions do not cover, and then we may sit down 
and wait to see them do our work and redeem 
our brother man ! Believe me, we shall wait in 
vain ! As Jesus put forth His hand and touched 
the leper, so must you ; and as His look recalled 
the erring Peter to His side, so must yours ! 



THE DRINK PROBLEM 35 

The world waits, we say, for better laws — 
or for better men to administer the laws ! No, 
my brother, it waits for love — the vigilance of 
love, the service of love, the sacrifice of love ! 
The whole moral sense of the community is 
congested with theories of Temperance Reform, 
which have in them every note of excellence 
but that of personal service — and that, if once 
we can be roused to it, will be worth them all ! 



MAR 1 19C5 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



027 279 908 8 




